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U.S. Returns Young Girl, a Citizen, to Guatemala

Leonel Ruiz, a landscaper in Brentwood, N.Y., was waiting at Kennedy International Airport on the early morning of March 11 for his 4-year-old daughter, Emily, to arrive home from a trip to Guatemala. The plane arrived hours late, but Emily was not on it, and neither was her grandfather, who was supposed to be escorting her back.

It took several hours for Mr. Ruiz to learn what had happened. Emily, a United States citizen, and her grandfather, a Guatemalan traveling with a valid work visa, had been detained by immigration authorities at Dulles International Airport near Washington, where the plane had been diverted because of bad weather. The officials had told Emily’s grandfather that because of an immigration infraction two decades ago, he would not be allowed to stay in the country.

That has left Emily, a pigtailed native of Long Island, in an unusual limbo. As a citizen, she has the right to re-enter her country. But her parents are illegal immigrants, which has complicated the prospect of a reunion.

Today, Emily is in Guatemala, her parents are struggling to bring her home, and lawyers and federal officials are arguing over parental responsibility and citizenship rights. The Ruizes find themselves on the front lines of a heated immigration debate: how to treat families in which the parents are here illegally, while their children, born in the United States, are citizens.

The case comes as elected officials across the country have pushed for bills to end automatic citizenship for children, born here, who are sometimes referred to pejoratively as anchor babies. Immigrant advocates say the proposals are antithetical to American ideals.

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Emily Ruiz, 4, was born here, the child of illegal immigrants.

There are two conflicting versions of the Ruiz story. Officials at Customs and Border Protection say they offered Mr. Ruiz the chance to pick up Emily at the airport, but he “elected to have her return to Guatemala with her grandfather.” The customs agency “strives to reunite U.S. citizen children with their parents,” Lloyd M. Easterling, a spokesman, said Tuesday.

But such a meeting could have put Mr. Ruiz at risk of detention, and he said he was never offered that option. In an interview conducted in Spanish, Mr. Ruiz, who speaks little English, said that an agent spoke to him over the telephone in English and laid out two choices: Emily could enter the custody of the State of Virginia, or she could return to Guatemala with her grandfather.

Terrified that she would be given up for adoption if she entered state custody, Mr. Ruiz said, he agreed to put her on a plane back to Guatemala. “We were very worried, and my wife was crying and crying at what was happening,” Mr. Ruiz said.

He said he would have gone to pick up Emily, and was in fact preparing to do so, but was not given the chance. “If we had to go there, we would have gone there,” he said.

The family’s lawyer, David M. Sperling, is planning to travel to Guatemala next week to escort Emily back to Long Island.

“She was treated like a second-class citizen or worse,” Mr. Sperling said. “She’s a U.S. citizen, and she’s entitled to the same rights as any other U.S. citizen.”

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Leonel Ruiz, the father of Emily Ruiz, came to the United States illegally in 1996 because, he said, "we were in a very poor situation in my country." Credit
Kathy Kmonicek for The New York Times

Immigrant advocates have seized on the Ruiz case as a sign of what may come if new legislation curtails the citizenship rights of illegal immigrants’ children.

“The case is alarming because it shows what can happen once you start treating kids who are born here whose parents are undocumented with less rights than a full-blown citizen,” said Jeanne A. Butterfield, a former executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association who has been acting as an informal adviser to Mr. Ruiz’s lawyers.

Last week, Arizona, which has become a national flash point in the immigration debate, rejected a measure aimed at pushing the Supreme Court to rule against automatic citizenship for American-born children of illegal immigrants. But elected officials in other states, like Kansas and California, have also signaled a desire to change the law to make it harder for such children to stay in the country.

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The Ruizes embody the difficulties of a family divided by citizenship. Mr. Ruiz, 32, was born and raised in a small village outside Guatemala City. He came to the United States illegally in 1996 because, he said, “we were in a very poor situation in my country.”

He settled on Long Island, finding work tending lawns. He eventually married another Guatemalan, Brenda Dubon, and they had two children: Emily and Christopher, 3.

Mr. Ruiz said he and his wife sent Emily to Guatemala for the winter because they worried that the cold weather in New York would aggravate her asthma. They are distraught, he said, that the family has been kept apart.

“This is very unfair because she is a citizen,” he said, “and she is a very little girl.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2011, on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Returns 4-Year-Old Girl, a Citizen, to Guatemala. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe